ExtraPenguin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
extrapenguin) wrote2019-01-12 02:33 pm
extrapenguin) wrote2019-01-12 02:33 pm
Hogwarts Sorting: Why I Hate It
We've all encountered it: "Here is a post sorting these characters from an unrelated canon into Hogwarts Houses!" and then the inevitable ten billion comments arguing that no, character X is totally a Hufflepuff/no, a Slytherin! etc. I have a number of problems with Hogwarts Sorting, so, here goes.
1. Oversimplification of characters
My biggest bugbear is that it inevitably degenerates into "is this character heroic, smart, ambitious, or hardworking?" (or some other tetrachotomy of plain adjectives), and since almost all characters worth thinking about contain multitudes and thus fit more than one category, it's meaningless. The reasons I like characters are their three-dimensional living, breathing complexity (or potential for it), and asking "But which one-dimensional archetype does the character belong to?" is the antithesis of it. Then there are the questions of interpretation: is this character's hard-workingness a reflection of their ambition, or do they only appear as ambitious because they're so hard-working? We don't know, and the question might be relevant under some contexts, but it's much more fun and productive to contemplate outside the Hogwarts house system, where the categories have so much baggage from Harry Potter canon that the categorization is skewed by unconscious biases to stick the faves into the heroic house(s) and the villains into the villain house.
Additionally, this whole thing encourages the "archetype plus 1-3 quirks" characterization style that I hate. Instead of seeing the character as in canon (and, okay, maybe simplifying based on that if necessary), people just go "oh, X is such a Gryffindor!" and ignore all the messy, loose bits that make the character actually interesting. It's reflected in fic, and it's reflected in people's discussions. This happens regardless of the archetype chosen, so Hogwarts houses aren't solely to blame, but they are part of a phenomenon I loathe and wish would go away. (Since it culminates in people simplifying X into an archetype, and saying "Oh I don't think X could ever do [thing X did in canon, repeatedly, which the narrative called into attention constantly]" based on the archetype they consider X to be a part of to be incapable of doing the thing.)
2. Houses ill-defined but also 100% British
In addition to the above, there's also the fact that the categories themselves are nebulously defined! We get a few descriptors of each house, but much more for eg Gryffindor than Hufflepuff, so a lot of the house sorting definitions are fanon – and different people have osmosed different pieces of the fanon; cue lots of arguing with shadows.
The houses were conceived as part of the British boarding school book tradition, as well as as a metaphor for different kinds of schools in Britain, where Slytherin is representative of exclusive private schools, and thus the entire Hogwarts house system is inextricably tangled up with class in a way that fandom ignores. It's also inextricably tangled up with Britain and the British boarding school genre and Britishness, and the further away from that cultural context you go, the more it turns into ripping the characters from their roots and pushing the corpses around in meaningless piles while they drip blood and viscera onto the ground in a perfect metaphor for British imperialism. It is often like trying to decide whether a shape is a square or a triangle, when the shapes are in fact all circles of varying colors.
3. Ubiquitous and inescapable
Regardless, if this were restricted to only a few people in some fandom corner, I'd just roll my eyes and move on, but it's absolutely everywhere, inescapable. I get into a new fandom and there's debate whether a character is in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw, and the only thought I can muster is that the entire dichotomy misses the point of the character; the character doesn't belong on one side of the line in the sad, but comfortably occupies a territory around it, unaware that people might even draw a line there.
In conclusion, I just find it unhelpful, unfun in the way it just ... disregards all the things I like about the characters (their background and complexity), and inescapable. Stuff like the![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
sortinghatchats system attempt to fix it by making it a matrix and actually defining the categories, but it's still tied to its Hogwarts past that clings to it like the frost to a traveler at the gates, and would've been better served severing the tie, though that'd have meant even fewer people would've heard of it. Categorization using Magic: the Gathering colors, brought up by ehyde, is more interesting and has less problems, since it's meant to be game mechanics based and the five colors should be roughly equal in game balance. Other sorting systems, like horoscopes and MBTI ("horoscopes for middle management") are also uninteresting, though due to the way sorting into them is less ubiquitous and there are more categories, I do not loathe them quite as much.
1. Oversimplification of characters
My biggest bugbear is that it inevitably degenerates into "is this character heroic, smart, ambitious, or hardworking?" (or some other tetrachotomy of plain adjectives), and since almost all characters worth thinking about contain multitudes and thus fit more than one category, it's meaningless. The reasons I like characters are their three-dimensional living, breathing complexity (or potential for it), and asking "But which one-dimensional archetype does the character belong to?" is the antithesis of it. Then there are the questions of interpretation: is this character's hard-workingness a reflection of their ambition, or do they only appear as ambitious because they're so hard-working? We don't know, and the question might be relevant under some contexts, but it's much more fun and productive to contemplate outside the Hogwarts house system, where the categories have so much baggage from Harry Potter canon that the categorization is skewed by unconscious biases to stick the faves into the heroic house(s) and the villains into the villain house.
Additionally, this whole thing encourages the "archetype plus 1-3 quirks" characterization style that I hate. Instead of seeing the character as in canon (and, okay, maybe simplifying based on that if necessary), people just go "oh, X is such a Gryffindor!" and ignore all the messy, loose bits that make the character actually interesting. It's reflected in fic, and it's reflected in people's discussions. This happens regardless of the archetype chosen, so Hogwarts houses aren't solely to blame, but they are part of a phenomenon I loathe and wish would go away. (Since it culminates in people simplifying X into an archetype, and saying "Oh I don't think X could ever do [thing X did in canon, repeatedly, which the narrative called into attention constantly]" based on the archetype they consider X to be a part of to be incapable of doing the thing.)
2. Houses ill-defined but also 100% British
In addition to the above, there's also the fact that the categories themselves are nebulously defined! We get a few descriptors of each house, but much more for eg Gryffindor than Hufflepuff, so a lot of the house sorting definitions are fanon – and different people have osmosed different pieces of the fanon; cue lots of arguing with shadows.
The houses were conceived as part of the British boarding school book tradition, as well as as a metaphor for different kinds of schools in Britain, where Slytherin is representative of exclusive private schools, and thus the entire Hogwarts house system is inextricably tangled up with class in a way that fandom ignores. It's also inextricably tangled up with Britain and the British boarding school genre and Britishness, and the further away from that cultural context you go, the more it turns into ripping the characters from their roots and pushing the corpses around in meaningless piles while they drip blood and viscera onto the ground in a perfect metaphor for British imperialism. It is often like trying to decide whether a shape is a square or a triangle, when the shapes are in fact all circles of varying colors.
3. Ubiquitous and inescapable
Regardless, if this were restricted to only a few people in some fandom corner, I'd just roll my eyes and move on, but it's absolutely everywhere, inescapable. I get into a new fandom and there's debate whether a character is in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw, and the only thought I can muster is that the entire dichotomy misses the point of the character; the character doesn't belong on one side of the line in the sad, but comfortably occupies a territory around it, unaware that people might even draw a line there.
In conclusion, I just find it unhelpful, unfun in the way it just ... disregards all the things I like about the characters (their background and complexity), and inescapable. Stuff like the
ehyde, is more interesting and has less problems, since it's meant to be game mechanics based and the five colors should be roughly equal in game balance. Other sorting systems, like horoscopes and MBTI ("horoscopes for middle management") are also uninteresting, though due to the way sorting into them is less ubiquitous and there are more categories, I do not loathe them quite as much.
no subject
Haha, I've not heard that characterization before, but that's really funny!
Anyway, I do love sorting characters as a pastime, and for me, the more systems the merrier -- Hogwarts houses is a quick an easy one (though, yes, in the non-matrixed form, so rough as to be meaningless for many characters), but I'm happy to explore any kind of division, like Hexarchate factions or whatever.
But this is a great and very fair point:
people just go "oh, X is such a Gryffindor!" and ignore all the messy, loose bits that make the character actually interesting. It's reflected in fic, and it's reflected in people's discussions.
Obviously, fanon tends to drift away from canon in general, and people oversimplify characters regardless, but it's certainly true that once you have a simple category to stick a character in and calcify your thinking of them as belonging to that category, it's a lot easier to ignore / forget everything that doesn't fit that category.
For me, the fun of sorting is in taking a character I'm interested in and holding them up to a variety of sorting systems and seeing where they would fit in with each taxonomy. Often there isn't a good fit in a particular one, but examining a character through that lens brings into relief some aspect of their personality I hadn't previously considered, or had not considered in that context. Or it makes me realize that, viewed through this taxonomic approach, they have a lot in common with this other character from the same or different canon, and it would be very neat to see how the two of them would react to each other.
But I can definitely see how the ubiquitousness of it would be really annoying if it's not your own cup of tea, or if it renders the fanon less interesting (the characters I tend to be most interested in sorting are ones from canons with not a lot of fanon floating around, or where I'm not part of the fanon discourse).
no subject
I guess I just don't "need" sorting to get to do this? I do most of my contextualizing via fic, anyway, and it just ... doesn't seem useful or interesting. It's also often presented as a way of figuring out The Truth of the characters, instead of a neat classification exercise or whatever.